Waitress

Waitress is a film written and directed by the late Adrienne Shelly and is about a woman starting a new life. It's all bathed in the warm glow of a Norman Rockwell painting. As Jenna, Keri Russell plays a depressed waitress at a cozy diner. Her sadness, however, is of the sit-com variety. She's unwilling or unable to do what it takes to convey the depths of despair attendant to a lousy marriage and dead end job. But that failing, coupled with a script no deeper than a thin crust quiche, make this movie about 90 minutes too long. Perhaps if Special Agent Dale Cooper (Twin Peaks) came strolling into her restaurant in search of the perfect cherry pie, it would have been a smidgeon, no - make that a pinch - better.

It starts off nicely enough with a tabletop of freshly baked treats. Fruit is sliced, bread kneaded and doughy strips carefully laid down by supremely proficient pie-making hands. Jenna is the creative, culinary concoctor behind these one-of-a-kind tarts with ingredients that come to her in a pie-in-the-sky sort of way, right off the top of her head. She dreams up these tartlets and names them accordingly, reflecting vices such as lust and betrayal. After all, she's married to Earl (Jeremy Sisto), a man insensitive to her needs. He's both a selfish lout and vaguely threatening hulk, with an emotional, rather than physical abusiveness. His blindness to her desires culminates with an immature insistence that she promise to love him more than their impending child. As the dutiful wife, she willingly complies to these demands with a robotic drone familiar to any spouse who's ever been on autopilot.

This lackluster domestic life gets slightly better when she walks out the door and goes to the diner, presided over by Cal (Lew Temple) a hard-to-please boss who's always after her to get out of the kitchen and back to work. His wait staff is rounded out by Dawn (Adrienne Shelley) a bespecked server looking for love and Becky (Cheryl Hines) who's apparently found it with Cal and quickies in the kitchen. But there's some spice in those leatherette banquettes, a sprinkling of pepper who goes by the name of Old Joe (Andy Griffith), a curmudgeonly coot ornery in that lovably old fashioned way, with a persnickety-ness common to anyone who's ever used the term aw shucks. But things really heat up (well beyond any 350 degree mark) when the married - but "not very" - Dr. Pomatter (Nathan Fillion) comes into town. He's a resident apparently brand spanking new to the realm of medical ethics. You could almost hear the oven timer buzzing in the background as Jenna and the handsome doctor fall into a heady affair. She makes him pies and a whole lot more in her kitchen and his office. But as her pregnancy wears on, so does her dissatisfaction with her husband and their half baked marriage.

Jenna, however, isn't the only one with love trouble. Her kitchen colleague and friend Dawn rejects a geeky suitor named Ogie (Edie Jemison) in a bloodless shot through the heart. After his blubbering, cartoonish display of tears, she has an epiphany and decides to marry her perpetually fawning sweetheart after all in a modest ceremony at, where else, the diner. But the nuptial festivities come to an uncomfortable climax when an angry Earl barges in, demanding that Jenna get in the car at once and come home.

Waitress wants to deal with some pretty serious issues - marital infidelity, depression and single motherhood among them - but has an unclear sensibility. It's not a comedy, nor a drama, no way a dramedy and sure as hell isn't a fairy tale, despite a glow that hovers like a halo around some of the scenes. You might want to trade in the film's rose colored glasses for a 3-D pair, if only for some depth of vision. When Jenna finally has her child, the event is treated as if it's something holy, or holier than thou, meaning you Earl out, as her lover doctor shows pappa the door. Mom's the only one allowed to bond with this baby, an apparent deus ex machina, fixing her life in one fell swoop. Post partem depression? Nope, all that was before the baby was born! But with the arrival of little Lulu, she abruptly says bye-bye to both her husband and lover quicker than you can say It's a Girl! This plot twist is so jarring you might wonder if some bullhorn stood on a table and blared out Okay, we gotta end this NOW! So they do, with our heroine facing her next chapter with an armful of baby as she saunters down the path less traveled with a marching band, balloons and bluebirds the only things missing to help usher in her new life.